Early primary students’ reading skills are declining, a new study claims
Published February 21, 2020
The report was funded by the Australian Research Council and tracked the development of 118 students from schools in disadvantaged communities, as well as the quality of teaching and support they received.
The students completed standardised measures assessing their development, attitudes, relationships, behaviour, oral language competence, and progress in literacy and numeracy.
The researchers write that, “scaled scores from the 118 children in our sample show a significant decline in word-level reading scores over time relative to age norms.”
Socioeconomic status doesn’t explain the decline, the researchers say, because the students included in the study that achieved average or above average scores were not more affluent than the students scoring below the average.
Researchers attribute the decline to a lack of explicit phonics-based instruction, as both phonemic decoding and sight word recognition scores declined, with students’ phonemic decoding skills showing significant weaknesses.
“This finding suggests that explicit phonics-based instruction is potentially a neglected component of reading instruction,” lead researcher Professor Linda Graham said.
“This is a common criticism of the ‘balanced literacy’ approach; an approach that dominates early reading instruction in most Australian schools.”
Graham worked alongside Associate Professor Sonia White and Haley Tancredi from QUT, Professor Pamela Snow from La Trobe University and Dr Kathy Cologon from Macquarie University to produce the report.
Students in the study tended to do better in Grade 1 than in the later years, leading researchers to contend that the reading instruction or support they received was not good enough.
Some at-risk students that initially recorded ‘below average’ results fell to ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’ over time. The study found that very few of these students ever had access to “evidence-based reading interventions”.
Instead, these students were more likely to receive behaviour plans, wobble chairs or supervision from teaching aides.
“We found that it was rare for teachers to consider behaviour as a possible indicator of underlying academic difficulties,” Graham said.
“Instead, teachers typically viewed it the other way around – that behaviour affects learning.
“But when teachers base teaching and resourcing decisions on simplistic interpretation of students’ surface-level behaviours, reading difficulties can easily be overlooked.”
Some teachers may believe that a student must have a departmentally diagnosed disability to be eligible for additional support, the researchers said.
“Yet, analysing results on an individual level showed that even when participating teachers did have concerns and children did receive support, it was rare for that support to be reading-related,” Graham said.
“This suggests that, in general, teachers are not accurately assessing and interpreting the characteristics presented by students with reading and language difficulties.”
To help address the issue, the researchers are calling for teachers to be given access to “evidence-based initial teacher education and professional learning opportunities”, to help them correctly interpret the characteristics students present with.
“To further assist teachers in identifying and addressing early reading difficulties, education departments can play a vital role by implementing a word-level reading task, such as the phonics screening check, to identify and address weaknesses in the different components of reading in the critical early years, before the curriculum marches on,” Graham said.
“By commissioning research to independently assess the effectiveness of common reading practices and promoting greater use of those found to be effective, governments can help teachers to best support their students.”
State education ministers recently agreed to back the Federal Government’s plan to embed the teaching of phonics and reading instruction into initial teacher education (ITE) and increase the amount of time allocated to literacy in ITE courses.
Graham, L.J., White, S.L.J., Tancredi, H.A. et al. A longitudinal analysis of the alignment between children’s early word-level reading trajectories, teachers’ reported concerns and supports provided. Read Writ (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-020-10023-7